All’Antico Vinaio

Francesca Frattini

Ingredient Innovation Champion

Francesca Frattini is Head of Marketing at All’Antico Vinaio, with 15 years of experience driving retail growth with a creative edge across fashion, fintech and food retail. Throughout her career, she has worked with leading international brands and high-growth companies, including GAP and Klarna, building distinctive brands and customer experiences across multiple industries. A graduate of Bocconi University’s Master’s in Marketing Management, she is particularly passionate about applying successful growth principles across sectors to create meaningful and memorable customer experiences.

Building Brands Across Industries: What Fashion, Fintech and Food Have in Common

How many transactions do you actually remember?

Not the product you bought. Not how much you spent. The transaction itself. Chances are, very few.

Yet many brands continue to focus most of their efforts on optimizing the final stages of the customer journey, the conversion, the purchase, the transaction itself, rather than designing what people actually remember: the feeling they leave behind.

Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity to work across fashion, fintech and food retail. On the surface, these industries could not be more different.

What surprised me most was how often the same principles appeared in different forms.

One of the greatest advantages of working across industries is that it forces you to stop looking at competitors for inspiration and to realise that the same challenge often appears under different names.

A fashion brand wants customers to feel confident and comfortable in their own skin. A fintech company wants users to feel secure and in control. A hospitality business wants guests to feel welcomed and valued.

Different industries, different objectives, different products. Yet the underlying principle is often the same. What changes is how it is expressed. In fashion, customers are rarely buying just a garment. The best brands understand they are helping people express an identity. The role of the sales associate is not simply to sell a garment, but to help customers discover something that reflects who they are and what makes them feel comfortable, confident and themselves. The product matters, but the experience surrounding it often determines how the brand is remembered.

In fintech, I often found myself asking a different question: who actually remembers a payment? For most people, the payment process is simply a necessary step between them and what they really want. The challenge was therefore not only to make transactions faster and more efficient, but to humanise them. Clear communication, intuitive experiences and reassuring language transformed what could have been a purely functional interaction into a positive one. Customers may not remember the payment itself, but they remember how easy and seamless the experience felt.

Hospitality offers perhaps the clearest expression of this principle. Two businesses can serve products of comparable quality and create completely different memories. A warm welcome. A genuine smile. A thoughtful recommendation. Remembering a returning guest’s preferences. Offering guidance that feels personal rather than scripted.

These moments may seem insignificant in isolation, yet they are often what customers remember long after they have forgotten the details of what they consumed. A great product creates satisfaction. A great experience creates a memory. And memory is what drives people to come back.

Technology has never been more powerful. Yet brands have never been more at risk of becoming indistinguishable. Data, automation and artificial intelligence are essential tools. They allow us to understand customers better, personalise experiences at scale and make smarter decisions.

But efficiency alone rarely creates value in the mind of a customer.

Technology can tell us what a customer prefers. Human insight determines what that preference means. As technology becomes more accessible, efficiency is increasingly becoming the cost of entry rather than a source of differentiation.

Competitive advantage will increasingly come from something far more difficult to replicate: the ability to create meaning.

When a format, trend, or service becomes successful, competitors often rush to imitate it. While this may generate short-term results, it rarely builds long-term brand value. Customers do not remember brands for copying what everyone else is doing. They remember brands for standing for something distinctive.

The objective is not to create the same emotions as everyone else. The objective is to create emotions that are authentic to your brand, coherent with your identity and meaningful to the people you serve.

People rarely build their identity around a brand. They choose brands that reinforce the identity they already have. The strongest brands create alignment between what they stand for and how customers see themselves. They create meaning that feels relevant, recognisable and worth returning to.

As technology continues to level the playing field, the brands that will stand out will not necessarily be those with the largest datasets or the most advanced systems. They will be the brands that use those capabilities to make people feel seen, understood and valued.

Whether we work in fashion, fintech, food, or hospitality, the challenge is ultimately the same. We are not simply designing products or optimising transactions. We are shaping perceptions, creating meaning and building memories. And those memories are what bring people back.